The Time I Gave Willa Another Try

I found Willa Cather’s “One of Ours” in The Battery, a used bookstore in Pasadena that I had been visiting since I was a teenager. It was the summer after my senior year of high school and I was looking for novels to bring with me to college. Two primary questions motivated my choosing that day: What kind of person did I want to be in this new stage of life? And how can I manifest that person through the discounted paperbacks I find in this store, right this second?

“My Antonia” had been required reading freshman year and had bored me to my core. Willa Cather sparked images of wheat fields and sad, sweaty people with little to say other than “Time to plow,” or “I’m with child,” (None of those descriptors are accurate by the way, they are the abstract interpretations of a 15-year-old girl who didn’t actually finish the book).

Knowing this, I’m surprised that “One of Ours” made it into my suitcase that year, and I can only assume that it was a decision made in rebellion to that younger, lazier self (“I will finish all required reading. I will wear eyeliner. I will stop eating junk food and start smoking cigarettes while discussing Proust.”).

Other than the smoking, which I picked up almost immediately, I didn’t get around to any of those other goals -- reading included -- but I did get around to boys, which was a first.

Coming from an all girl’s school, I had very little experience with love. No boyfriends, no girlfriends, no secretly watching porn, barely any kisses, and definitely no sex. When I left for college, my inner love landscape was relatively pure and painfully vulnerable to soul crushing rejection.

Which brings me to: When I finally picked up “One of Ours” about a month before the school year ended, I had come off the backend of a particularly confusing experience with a guy. I felt worthless, and at the depths of this emotion sat the guilt and stupidity I felt for not reading a situation correctly. For not seeing a man properly.

“One of Ours” is about a lot of things, but what hit me hardest wasn’t the plot, it was that a woman had written so vividly about what was, arguably, an extremely masculine experience. She made Claude feel real. She made his mistakes and regrets feel real. Jesus, she made war feel real. I cried over that last page like a baby.

I purchased the book hoping that it would define me, but what it defined was something else. It showed me that the female experience of men, the female perception of men, is just as valid as the existence of men. Sometimes it’s even more accute than their perceptions of their own existence (sorry).

And that is so often true for anyone who has been relegated to the proverbial passenger seat. They tend to see the trees and the roads and the hazards more clearly.